The largest single online collection of English news media from the 17th and 18th centuries – the Burney Collection - is now available free of charge for the first time to Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils across the UK.

The Burney Collection offers unique insights into two centuries of history through access to over 1,270 newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from British colonies in the Americas and Asia.

Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library, and then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level following an open and transparent procurement process.

Until now, access to the Burney Collection has been restricted – both in print and online. The corpus of printed materials – originally collected by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757–1817) and greatly augmented since its acquisition – has been housed at the British Library but, due to its value and fragility, it has not been available for general use. In addition, the cost of acquiring online access to the Collection has been beyond the means of the majority of institutions.

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